World's leading customer relationship management (CRM) software maker Salesforce.com is close to acquiring Dimdim, Inc., a US and India based web conferencing company. Salesforce people have already moved into Dimdim's development centre in Hyderabad, according to sources, for due diligence.
When contacted, a spokesperson for Salesforce replied, saying: "We do not comment on speculation or rumour.” A mail sent to Dimdim founder and CEO DD Ganguly and to Suvir Sujan, Managing Partner, Nexus India Venture Partners, who is a board member, did not elicit a response till the time of posting this article.
Lowell, Massachusetts-based Dimdim offers web-based conferencing services using latest web 2.0 tools and is a competitor to other paid services like Webex and GoToMeeting. Dimdim has basic (free) plans and Pro (paid) plans which include services such as sharing desktops, slide sharing, collaboration, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam. It recently launched Dimdim 6.0, the latest version of its browser-based web conferencing tool with features like improved screensharing capabilities and the ability to host four-way video conferences.
Dimdim, founded in 2007, had raised a total of $8.4 million in two rounds of venture funding from the same set of investors which included Mumbai-based Nexus Venture Partners, Index Ventures and Draper Richards - some of whom have backed companies like Skype, Hotmail, and MySQL.
Dimdim’s co-founders are DD Ganguly (CEO), who was founder and CEO of Advanced Internet Management (acquired by Computer Associates), and Prakash Khot, co-founder and CTO of DimDim, who previously led CA’s radio-frequency identification (RFID) Group as CTO.
Salesforce.com is an NYSE listed enterprise cloud computing company, which offers products like customer relationship management services as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. It also has platforms like Force.com, a cloud platform for building and running business apps, and Chatter, an enterprise collaboration application. It has a market capitlisation of around $15 billion.
Salesforce, founded in 1999, has $1.3 billion in revenue in the fiscal year ended in January 2010 and has about 2,500 employees in San Francisco, where it's headquartered. The acquisition of Dimdim will help Salesforce integrate web collaboration services in its existing offerings.
Once the deal goes through, it will be the second exit for Nexus Venture Partners which is one of the original investors in Dimdim. In August this year, Nexus exited its stake in online classifieds firm OLX by selling stake to South Africa's Naspers.
